“Where would you go? Who’d have you?”
“I’ll go to Ma’s” (that was Jane) “She’d not turn me away!” And he was right.
Jane was never afraid or slow to criticise Julia’s behaviour towards George or the girls, and Julia could not take criticism or even questioning of her words or deeds because she was always right! Perhaps it was a desire to strike back that caused Julia, one day when Jane had reprimanded her about something regarding Janet (then 20-ish), to spit out at Jane-
“Mom, that girl that you’re feeling sorry for, has done something so awful, I can’t begin to tell you! If I did, you would never want to see or hear of her again!” Julia wouldn’t and didn’t elaborate. It might have been anything imaginable. It might equally have been a total fabrication, but it left a cloud, all the same.
By the time George died in ’77, Julia was retired, Janet was married, and Mary had two houses of holiday flats in Great Yarmouth, where the family had been settled in the holiday trade for over 20yrs- more of which when we get there. Mary had recovered from her disastrous affair with their family solicitor, an Indian old enough to be her father, and all its messy public exposure when the offended wife threw the shit at the fan. George had been totally unaware. Julia had been well aware, but turned a blind eye, because even married and unavailable, a solicitor is still an impressive social caller, on the seaside landlady’s scale of things, and he was a constant source of sound business advice.
But when poor Mary finally decided she was more comfortable with her own sex, Julia threw a wobbler.
Julia’s last years were spent nominally living with Mary, until between hospital stays, Julia was shunted into a series of old folks’ homes (old, frail and tired, yes, but she still managed to trash one room, completely, in frustration at not getting her own way) because she was giving Mary so much grief when they were together. So Mary finally took control of her own life by deciding to share it with her friend, Alison.
Valerie and I visited Julia in hospital, on her 90th birthday, for just the last half hour of visiting time, not wanting to crowd things, knowing that her family were going in force. We got there to find her alone and asleep. It was her 90th birthday, and they all left early- after she had dozed off? That makes it better? We sat for half an hour, left a box of Turkish Delight (which she loved) on her locker, with a card, and left her to her sleep.
I used to joke about her eventual demise. I said that, at her funeral, she’d be sitting up in the coffin, telling Mary how much ham to put in the sandwiches. I also said, they’ll have to cremate her because if they bury her, she’ll be all over the cemetery. Imagine taking flowers. First you’d have to call at the superintendent’s office to find out where she is. ‘Well she’s got a nice plot down by the lake, at the moment, with the swans and the ducks to pass the time, but she says it’ll be too damp in the winter, so she’s getting an exchange to go up under the beeches where it’ll be a bit dryer, in nice time for the cold, wet weather’.
In hospital, just before she died, she kept asking-
“When am I going home?” At her funeral, she finally got her wish to go home, but only as far as the kerb, outside. After the funeral, Janet related how she had visited, the evening before she died, and she was asking again-
“When am I going home?”
“I told her ‘We’ll talk about that in the morning’ but I could see she wasn’t going to last the night, when I left her”
I said nothing, but I thought ‘How do you reconcile those two statements-I could see she wasn’t going to last the night, and I left her. I couldn’t have left my Mom, but I have to remind myself, my Mom was Betty- not Dorothy, not Julia.
I often think of Julia- garrulous, domineering, hard working, sad, lonely Julia, and I ask ‘What did you do to them to make them regard you like that? Then I remember the clergyman who used to make pastoral visits to her, in her last years. He told Mary, he would come away feeling like something obnoxious, stuck under a shoe.
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| Julia Comes Home |
Oh, come on. We can’t leave her there, even though there’s more, later. We must go back, forwards- no, sorry, we must go forwards back to the boarding house to see Julia laughing at herself for being stupid. She’s pouring gravy, or custard, or milk, from one container to another, adding from this to that, trying to reduce the number of jugs in use. That big one is ¾ full; this smaller one is ½ full. It looks too much to transfer, but the trick is to empty the small one into the big one quickly before the big one fills and overflows!
It doesn’t look the same in words. You have to get a couple of jugs and try it yourself. Whenever the situation occurred, Julia thought you could get a quart into a pint pot, provided you poured it quickly enough! In Julia, it would be understandable to call it her slant on the Canute syndrome. Many a time there would be a squawk; we would turn and find the kitchen table awash with gravy, and Julia collapsing with laughter at herself. Yes, that’s better. Now we can move on.
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